On December 1st 2020 the Carnegie UK Trust launched its report from the COVID and Communities Listening Project, which held over 80 conversations during the pandemic, ranging across the UK. Pippa Coutts led the project and says that the nightmare of the pandemic might be the catalyst needed to make change happen. A change which would put caring for each other at the top of the agenda…

What if we brought the whole human being into the workplace? We’ve been talking in our changing practices and relationships cell about how to change how we work to help build relationships and community. Ben Collins suggests we think of organisations as communities in which we nurture relationships and trust people more and stop thinking about them in hierarchical ways, something which seems more possible in the light of Covid-19, as Zoom has been a great leveller. ‘Now there is an opportunity for our organisations to do something more conscious, more deliberate - acknowledge that power can come from the people who work in them - ultimately a force far greater than the artificial power invested in or created by those organisations themselves.’

Sufina Ahmad, Director of the John Ellerman Foundation, writes about why it’s essential that charitable foundations do more to share their power, summarising her opening remarks at our roundtable with funders in July. ‘We often take it as read that we are doing good – but are we? Discussions in the sector, especially in the last year or two, about racism, systemic and structural inequalities, power imbalances and our language and framing of issues as often being very deficits focused, suggests that we are perhaps part of the problem too.’ In this blog she explores how charitable foundations can share, build and wield power more effectively, drawing on the recommendations in NPC’s report, A rebalancing act: How funders can address power dynamics.